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It’s been a great summer for reinventions vis a vis “Orange Is the New Black” and co-stars Kate Mulgrew and Lorraine Toussaint, who are unrecognizable compared to their former TV selves.

And now here comes Amy Brenneman, star of such mainstream network dramas as CBS’s “Judging Amy” and ABC’s “Private Practice.”

Those two series, along with Brenneman’s TV debut as Det. Janice Licalsi on the landmark ABC drama “NYPD Blue,” would be enough to satisfy any actress’ professional ambitions.

Brenneman’s stunning return in HBO’s “The Leftovers” — as Laurie, a former therapist who has joined the Guilty Remnant, or “GR,” a cult of Rapture survivors — comes without a word.

That’s right. Brenneman, now 50, does not speak. She stares. In her white schmatte and frizzed-out hair, she looks like Carole King on Thorazine.

Fortunately, Brenneman is all-too-happy to talk to The Post about her new role as she rides in the back of a car bound for the LA airport.

“[Executive producer] Damon Lindelof (“Lost”) told me, ‘Here’s why you shouldn’t take this job. It shoots in New York; you have children in LA. You don’t wear makeup. And you don’t speak.’ And I said, ‘Sign me up,’” she says.

In “The Leftovers,” the members of the GR “have chosen to live outside normal society,” Brenneman says. “There are those who say we must go back to the life we knew.”

The Guilty Remnant gives everyone the silent treatment, popping up in front of people’s homes or in restaurants, puffing on cigarettes and staring. It’s an unsettling way of recruiting new members, but their air of sinister dishevelment seems to work.

“I’ve never done anything remotely like this,” Brenneman says. “When I created ‘Judging Amy,’ I wanted to be at the center of this wheel. Then I had children. You can’t be hub of the wheel; your orientation changes.

“So, since the kids, I have been looking for an ensemble, but not where you’re supporting the guy who solves the crime,” she says. “As for the non-speaking thing, I don’t have a ton of vanity, but I have some. My husband [director Brad Silberling] said, ‘You were coming from a Shonda Rhimes show, where the actors were like pieces of wrapped candy.’

“Going from that to this place, it feels like an independent film, where you’re stripped down. I would try to sneak in mascara and Damon would text me, saying, ‘On network, we have a no-makeup look. This is No Makeup.’ I had to fully go there.”

Laurie’s tenure in the GR becomes an issue in the series, which is based on a novel by Tom Perrotta. She has family ties to people in Mapleton, NY, the show’s fictitious town, but she’s torn between going back to them and to her new life.

“The most honest thing I can do is not speak,” she says. “Laurie wants to hold a space for all the things that can’t be expressed.” As a veteran of three series, Brenneman is teaching the ropes of TV production to co-star Liv Tyler, who plays a conflicted young woman named Meg and has never done a series.

“I told her, ‘You don’t really know what’s going to happen in the next script.’ We’re telling this long amazing story. In a network TV show, all is revealed in that one episode. If your character does something heinous, the [justice] scales are tilted in that hour.”

She acknowledges that many of characters on “The Leftovers” are “walking around utterly heartbroken,” but none more so than Kevin Garvey, the town’s police chief played with a mixture of bewilderment, fury and sorrow by Justin Theroux.

“He is intense,” she says of Theroux. “I sort of mentally collect performances by men who can give off a confident masculinity and vulnerability. Caruso did it on ‘NYPD Blue’ … Not a lot of dudes can do it.